December 10th, 2024, 4:00 PM

Miller Hull Partnership Office, Seattle, WA

lecture given by Jonnie Nelson

 

So I went to a bad movie night, and saw Megalopolis. It dug such a hole in my brain. I had to write it into my presentation, and so I'm going to focus on one quote from this movie, which was, “architecture is frozen music”. He uses that line in the movie. And this movie, it's about an architect who's a visionary in a future society.[i] And this quote stuck with me, because it occurred to me that this is how our culture thinks about architecture: as frozen music. But what does that actually mean?

 

In the context of this movie, it's the glorification of a white male figure with absolute control over society, echoing Robert Moses. This character literally has the power to stop time at will, and I think Copolla thought that only when you stop time and silence the world around you, can you actually build a Utopia.[ii] And when we talk about frozen music, we're tapping into this cultural bias to see architecture as a silent tabula rasa. Architecture can be inspired by the western classical aesthetic order of music, but in order to see the beauty of that order, you have to step outside of time into the silent garden of architecture.

 

This idea maybe appears in quotes from Louis Kahn, who, I think, used the word silence to describe the way that light was responding to static architecture.

 

“Silence to Light

Light to Silence

The Threshold of their crossing

Is the Singularity

Is inspiration

(where the desire to express meets the possible)

is the Sanctuary of Art

is the Treasury of the Shadows

(Material casts shadows belongs to light” [iii]

 

 But I think our culture interprets this quote differently and thinks about his work as monumental or timeless, and I think when we hear Kahn use the word “silence”, we think about his big concrete volumes and the way that they isolate his architecture from the rest of the world.[iv] And I also think about Frank Lloyd Wright, who wrote about architecture as a system mimicking a musical score.

 

“It is perfectly true that music and architecture flower from the same stem. The composer has his score. The architect has his … system on which he works, and the minds are very similar, practically the same.

 

My father was a musician … he taught me to see a great symphony as an edifice, an edifice of sound…

 

So never miss the idea that architecture and music belong together. They are practically one.” [v]

 

I've toured a lot of his homes, and I think Wright probably thought of himself as a bit of a creative genius creating architecture from the natural order of the universe, kind of like a musical score as he's writing here.[vi] He probably believed that only his method could shield you from the chaos of city life, and this would have made sense for the time period. He was practicing during the Garden City movement and building suburbs, especially outside of Chicago with the growth of industrial noises. Frank Lloyd Wright’s homes could be perceived as a sanctuary from sound. Where music is frozen, you can escape the march of time. But is that really the world that we want to live in?

 

And so this is where I'd like to enter the story. That's me and my brother. We were raised by a family of musicians in Racine, Wisconsin, which is actually a Frank Lloyd Wright mecca. My mom bought me Legos as a child, and probably had a vision of me becoming an architect. And she took me on a lot of the home tours around there. And being a musician, she talked about the space in terms of some of the musical terms that we knew like repetition, harmony, balance. And this is kind of my first introduction to architecture through the lens of music through my mom, who's really, really supportive. And years later I went to University of Wisconsin for architecture school, and I think I probably took a lot of these ideas and tropes into architecture school from the Frank Lloyd Wright tours, and from what I knew about music.

 

But I don't think I really started to question my own construction of the world until I started doing this project with my Professor Chris Cornelius in school, which was really kind of a project about tools, instruments, technology. Many of you have seen this. I keep beating this dead horse to death. It's a really interesting project about how to author new instruments to visualize and represent sound differently. But this isn't going to be the topic of the presentation today. You know, I was interested in this as a topic, but I thought it was a little bit too complicated to consider creating new tools, and it was getting really technical. And that's when I read this [Juhani Pallassma] quote: “the site isolates, whereas sound incorporates… vision is directional, sound is omnidirectional… I regard an object, but sound approaches me… the eye reaches, but the ear receives… Buildings do not react to our gaze, but they do return sounds back to our ears…”  and I decided that I wanted to explore the way that sound is subjectively and intimately connected to our own bodies and our own sense of hearing.[vii] And this is going to be kind of the topic of this presentation: architecture, sound and the body.

 

I started investigating this, and I found it to be really hard because I stumbled into this Western cultural bias for vision over sound. We really live in a visual culture. This is a great quote by the acoustician Schafer, who wrote a great book about this.

 

“In the west, the ear gave way to the eye as the most important gatherer of information about the time of the Renaissance, with the development of the printing press and perspective painting. One of the most evident testaments of this changes the way in which we have come to imagine God. It was not until the Renaissance that God became portraiture. Previously he had been conceived as sound, or vibration.

 

In the Zoroastrian religion, the priest Srosh (representing the genius of hearing) stands between man and the pantheon of the gods, listening for the divine messages, which he transmits to humanity.” [viii]

 

And you know, I think it's possible that we've lost what it means to be an auditory culture. Sounds aren't meaningful. They were pre-renaissance when they had all this religious connotation, but now we live in a noisy and distracting industrial world. And that really predisposes us to silence and noise reduction rather than appreciating some of these sounds that, you know… pre-Renaissance, would have been like the voice of God—like an organ.[ix] With this proliferation of noise that I'm seeing… this was something that was studied in the seventies.

 

The author of this book, Schafer, coined the term soundscapes, and he wanted people to better understand the sounds of the built environment. And that's why he came up with the term. and I tried to take on a similar task of collecting sounds. That's me and my brother making sounds, him on his trumpet under the I-5 Colonnade Park. I really wanted to see what it was like to experience these sounds, and I got high-tech recording equipment to be able to capture all these moments. And it was exciting to me, because I found a lot of complexity and change and activity in these spaces that I didn't really think twice of before. And I really want to challenge architecture to listen to these spaces and imagine what we might find in them.

 

And that's going to take me to the 1st part of my presentation, called Soundscapes. And I'm going to start off by playing a recording of St. Mark's Cathedral. If you've been there in Capitol Hill, it's a great space with an organ. I just want to play what that sounds like.

 

Yeah, this organ is incredible. That's almost like an 8 second reverb time, which is unheard of in this concrete space. And this performance that I went to—their evensong Worship Service—really triggered a lot of feelings and thoughts for me. I really thought about the way that you experience sound in music in a church. You know, I grew up in a church, and the organ is really meant to be powerful. It's meant to evoke feelings of a higher power inside you, and it's really meant to connect with your own body, especially the physical vibrations of the organ. And this really got me thinking about Foucault, and the way that he wrote about discipline in the monastery. The monastery imposed what Foucault called discipline, which is basically just behaviors and language and rituals that govern the way that bodies interact with each other in space. It's kind of a soft power. It's not a king forcing you to do something, but it's the way that you naturally behave in a space because of culture. And in the monastic tradition this kind of discipline would have come from early technology, like the clock or the bell, or even singing and auditory reading. And these are all primarily auditory phenomena, especially the bell. We don't really have monasteries anymore, but capitalism has adapted all these instruments and taken them from religion and applied them to machines and mass production. You know, gunpowder, war, and industry, since the Renaissance, really stole the exclusive privilege to make sound from the church, and it's made those sacred sounds profane. This is a great quote by Schafer, that sort of hints at that idea.

 

“Throughout Christendom, the divine was signaled by the Church bell...The interior of the church, too, reverberated with the most spectacular acoustic events, for this place man brought not only his voice, raised in song, but also the loudest machine he had till then produced--the organ. it was all designed to make the deity listen.”  [x]

 

And I think society has kind of accepted this transfer of power, and brought us into an industrial culture, where we permit pretty loud and dangerous levels of noise in exchange for material benefits of our modern culture. And one of the side effects is this pervasive desire for silence.

 

Trains are a great example of this kind of industrial soundscape. I'm going to play an example of that.

 

These machines really measure and mark our lives. And at the Olympic Sculpture Park, you really get a sense for how these machines feel and how they vibrate the ground, and the power that they hold over you. I think Weiss/Manfredi was really intentional about highlighting that experience through the architecture, and really making you feel it. Which I think is really incredible, and kind of testament to these machines.

 

Here's another Schafer quote, calling out just how significant the train was to an early industrial society as kind of this new marker of power in the landscape.

 

“By comparison with the sounds of modern transportation, those of the trains were rich and characteristic: the whistle, the bell, the slow chuffing of the engine at the start…the sudden explosions of escaping steam—these were all memorable noises.” [xi]

 

We even use machine language to talk about characteristics of sound, like amplitude, frequency, duration. We use objective standards like noise, reduction, coefficient, sound transmission class to talk about how sound waves react with reference to a specific tool, but not necessarily with reference to our ears and the way we perceive it. And I wonder if, when we start to objectify sounds in our environment, we start to ignore feelings like, “is this annoying? Is it a flat line—monotonous, like an air conditioner? Or is it complex like a bird? Is it discernible? Is it frightening? Is it emotionally moving?”

 

And for good reason, we don't necessarily focus on all these things. It's too difficult to design spaces for subjective feelings. They're super variable across people and situations. But I think this creates a bit of a disconnect where we're trying to use objective measurements like sound frequency, duration, to talk about things that are individual to each person in the environment. And I think it's a bit of a language problem. And I wonder if it's possible that we accept so much unwanted noise in our environment because we lack the framework to talk about it.

 

I was thinking a lot about noise—sounds, unwanted sounds—and I met up with Eric Klein from Tenor, and we had a really great conversation about sounds. In the context of his work, he is actively creating spaces to block out unwanted sounds, and to enhance the sounds inside the space. We had a long conversation, but to summarize: It's really difficult to get all parties to agree upon on the same baseline acoustic performance, which is basically just to say that we all don't know what sounds good. There's no agreed upon standard. Every one of these different groups has a different need. They're going to have different expectations for architecture. And as he explained it to me, he's seeing a wide range of what's being built. And having this lack of a suitable baseline, has kind of created a misunderstanding of what noise is, cause not everyone agrees on what noise actually is. In his opinion, unwanted sounds are poorly managed, and occupants potentially have unrealistic expectations of sound control in their buildings. I want to share a couple of really great snippets from the interview I had with Erik.

 

Erik: “…The more that we can start to have the subjective conversation and correlate it with objective measurements, we may start to find different things coming out in the data. That's where I find that there's an opportunity for us to potentially move the industry in a way that maybe is different than what we're thinking about now…. If I talked to somebody who is in an apartment and they overlook Interstate 5, for instance, even if they have good windows, they're going to have a certain amount of traffic noise that comes through… If I were to ask them how much they hear their neighbors—walking, airborne sound, music—most say, “I never hear my neighbors. It's great, like my building is soundproof.” That's an interesting, you know, perspective. Occasionally we'll go and assess and usually those buildings are OK. They're never as great as I think a lot of times people perceive…”“If I have a building though, that is completely more remote, it doesn't have that kind of level of background sound… a place like a new community out in Maltby... And if I ask them, how do they perceive their neighbors, they hear everything. And I may assess the building and find it's performing better than that other building. And then it's like, oh, you know what? I took away the constant noise…And when we looked at the background sound level in their space, it was very low, like less than 20 decibels in some of their spaces. And when we inquired, like, what are the things that normally fill your home? And they're like, “Well, we read lots of books and we cook,” and it's like they're not necessarily introducing sounds in their own environment. And so now their sensitivity is heightened to the things that happen outside of their own space.”

​

Jonnie: “Do you think people really want this level of silence they keep asking for?”

​

Erik Klein: “No, I think they want quiet, but I think we have mistakenly assumed that quiet means a lack of sound. My personal opinion is, quiet is a lack of distractions and disruptions. We do quite a bit of work in hospitals. And I’ve gone into hospitals that are existing to do assessments, and almost every time, I see some sign: “Shh, be quiet”. They’re thinking that we will get better quiet perception for our patients and our staff if we don’t talk, if we don’t move… except now you’ve lowered that threshold, you’ve increased that sensitivity, and now anything that happens, is going to be more noticeable for any individual.” [xii]

 

These clips are a bit of a light bulb moment for me, because what he's really getting at is kind of this dual approach where you have objective standards, because that can be implemented into a building. But you also have this very subjective experience where potentially lowering a sound level in a building simply makes your hearing more heightened, and it's kind of a feedback loop. And these two things really play off each other. It's not like you have an objective way, and a subjective way of hearing sound. Whether you're machine, whether you're human… it's all really one and the same.

 

What I took away from this conversation is that we really need an objective baseline for repeatable results. But we have to do a better job at understanding our spaces subjectively. And where does that leave us? Where do we go from there?

 

I thought that the part about standards, regulations, code, was really fascinating but was kind of outside of my scope of abilities after talking with Erik. But I tackled this challenge of subjective listening, using a framework called deep listening, developed by Pauline Oliveros, who's an accordion player. And I tried to adapt this approach to architecture. And I want you to practice this with me and focus on the way environments sound… the way that you situate yourselves within a space… and how the sound is reactive to that space. Here's a couple of sound samples that I think really capture that.

 

Does anybody know what that space is? Want to know what it is? It's the Seattle Central Library going up from 4th Avenue through the doors of the elevator up on 5th Avenue. I have another sound sample, but in the interest of time I'm going to stop it halfway through.

 

This is Occidental Park. Many of you've joined me for the listening exercise at our Design Panel a couple months back, and this was really the purpose of that exercise (whether or not I situated it in my research, the way I'm doing it today). I think this kind of listening is really fascinating, especially when you close your eyes, because your brain filters out so much information when you're in situ, in an environment listening. And you're only focusing on things that are immediately relevant, and for important reasons. Your brain's cutting out information as you're processing. But suddenly, when you take a recording and you separate yourself, and many of you might have noticed this in that hallway, listening to samples—just how disorienting it is—I think it's almost too much information all at once. And your brain suddenly opens up to this higher level of kind of acoustic perception.

 

And that's what I was really enjoying about this process of recording cityscapes. I was hearing so much that I didn't hear before when I was in the space, and I was training my brain to better process the spaces that I was walking through. I was hoping that on the day when we were sketching, I might invite some of you to go through that process of deep listening and understanding visually and auditorily what you're hearing. And some of the sketches you all made were just really beautiful.

 

So one particularly meaningful recording that I took throughout this process was footsteps in the Volunteer Park Water Tower, which I'm going to play for you.

 

I love this space for many reasons. And here's a couple really awesome characteristics about the space. It has a double helix staircase with 2 entrances and 2 landings, which means you can't really tell where sound is coming from. In that recording, I couldn't tell if I was on the same staircase as the mother and daughter, and if they're going to run into me, and it's sort of disorienting acoustically. I love that.

 

Your eye level is at the level of the tree canopy, and you hear all the birds… you are kind of opened up to this entire avian acoustic world that is totally muffled out from the ground. You get a kind of glimpse into their life.

 

And it's interesting when you compare that to how this tower was built originally. This is part of the Olmstead 100-year vision with all of their parks. They wouldn't have had that experience at the time, but they would have known—at least I hope they would have known—that a hundred years later, they would have created this beautiful enriching experience of the birds at the observation deck level.

 

You know, on the flip side of the 100-year vision, is now the water tower is almost perfectly in line with the SeaTac flight path. And then you get these flyovers that kind of punctuate soundscape every, I don't know.. 10 to 30 min… There's also just this really great material quality of the metal and the mass and the echoes that you get from that. And kids just love playing in this space. And if you're lucky, you can get a few kids are goofing around, and it's just really… anyway…

 

And so when you hear a space like this, I see potential for architecture to be indeterminate, to be expressive… to embrace the chaos of the natural world rather than try and control it. I began the talk with a discussion about how traditional notions of architecture might try to create silence from a blank slate. But what if we didn't start from a blank slate? What if architecture harmonized with the sounds of the birds and the planes, and the footsteps and children's laughter?

 

I took this recording, and I knew I had to bring it to life. And so I began experimenting using software, which is a hobby of mine. Here are some of the audio effects that I ran it through on my computer. Here's a few more. And I kind of quickly came up with this concept of recording sounds live and playing it back in the space with some really simple gear. And I went into the stairwell a couple months ago and tested it all out. And I put together this graphic, and I sent it to the city--The Parks Department rather—and applied for a permit to build an installation in the water tower. And it was shockingly easy. Once I finally heard back from them. I paid him 500 bucks, and they said, “sure, like, go do it”. The guy didn't even show up and like, let me in.

 

I'm going to show you what this installation turned out to be like.

 

So this project was a blast, and I learned a lot from the process of building and experiencing this for a whole day. And you know, I found myself behaving a lot more like a musician than an architect, which is a weird space to be in for this research grant. And as I was trying to grapple with this question, I read a lot of 20th century musicians who are actually doing the same thing. Satie was experimenting with performing music as an architectural element. He called the piece Musique d'ameublement, which is armchair music, and he literally instructed his audience to walk around as if the music wasn't playing, which, of course, no one did. And Satie was actually a contemporary of Corbusier, who honestly kind of butted heads with Satie, and was a little bit dismissive of the sounds in the built environment. He called them ronron, which is kind of a word for like purring. That's kind of a negative connotation for him, because he wanted more control over the soundscape. And he hired Iannis Xenakis, and professional composers to write music for his Philips installation.[xiii]

 

And so he's trying to exert really specific control over the sounds in the space and compose space for sounds. And I thought that this kind of architectural lens of sound was really fascinating in this time period. But in my observation, architecture has kind of moved away from this interpretation, and it seems to me that architects broadly relinquish control over the sounds and performances that occur in a building. Radio City Hall is pretty prime example of this. This is an extremely flat sounding space, designed for radio and designed for recording, with very few acoustic characteristics inside the space. And this somewhat mirrors the way that the acoustic industry, at least in performing space, has been, where performance halls are meant to be adaptable for a wide range of uses. And you don't necessarily have that thumbprint of a specific sound the way it would have been in the past, for example, like Boston Symphony Hall, which is one of the most renowned halls for specifically western style classical music, but maybe not for other types of music.

 

Architecture has kind of relinquished that sort of control and put it on to specialists—acousticians. They made it kind of a technical field. You know, my sound installation was maybe a bit of a challenge to this trend, and a challenge to the notion that sound and architecture are meant to sound flat or perhaps frozen. The installation tried to blur the line between musician and architect, creating sounds that are situational and site specific, using architecture as an instrument for enjoyment.

 

And it raises 3 really important questions for me that I'd like to leave you with, that I've been pondering this entire project that I don't have answers to, but have been kind of a source of inquiry for me:

 

To what extent are architects responsible for the soundscapes of the built environment?

 

If we are responsible, how should we author such soundscapes?

 

At what point in taking agency over sound do we become interdisciplinary?

 

 

[i] Megalopolis. DVD. United States: Lionsgate Films, 2024.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Kahn, Louis I. “Kahn Introduction.” The Louis I. Kahn Facsimile Project, 2022. https://www.louisikahn.com/kahn-introduction.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Wright, Frank  L. “VIDEOPOLEMICS.” 32BNY. Accessed December 10, 2025. https://32bny.com/architectonics-of-music-blog.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Pallasmaa, Juhani. “Acoustic Intimacy.” Essay. In The Eyes of the Skin, 49–49. Chichester: John Wiley-Son Ltd, 2009, 49

[viii] Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape our sonic environment and the tuning of the world R. Murray Schafer. Rochester: Destiny Books, 2006, 10.

[ix] Ibid,10.

[x] Ibid, 52.

[xi] Ibid, 81

[xii] Nelson, Jonathan, and Erik Miller-Klein. Interview with Erik Miller-Klein. Personal, September 20, 2024.

[xiii] Graham, James. “Musique En Fer Forgé: Erik Satie, Le Corbusier, and the Problem of Aural Architecture.” AA Files 68 (2014): 3–15.